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What non-FOSS software are you using that you wish you could replace? (beehaw.org)

submitted 1 year ago by John_Coomsumer@beehaw.org to c/foss@beehaw.org

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For me its honestly a ton of my work software (digital forensics), shit is too niche to be replaced by good FOSS options. Cellebrite, Magnet Axiom, etc. Autopsy is great and free and has a linux version but it simply cannot get the same level of data without a pretty nutty level of custom code.

And the biggest side effect of this is FUCKING WINDOWS. God I would replace this nightmare OS in a heartbeat if the aforementioned work software would make linux compatible versions. We have legitimately wasted 10k hours dealing with windows bullshit that would not be a problem in linux. Though im sure linux would take a different 10k for its own problems.

What about you guys? Doesn't have to be work related, thats just the thorn in my side right now.

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[–] ReK_@lm.bittervets.org 21 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Microsoft Office. If you need to do any kind of professional documentation for external organizations, it's basically impossible to use anything else.

[–] tesseract@beehaw.org 16 points 1 year ago

The lack of good support for MS Office formats in FOSS tools is Microsoft's fault. Office itself often creates files that are slightly incompatible with their own published OOXML standard. FOSS tools are left chasing these inconsistencies. I wish the world had settled on ODF instead of OOXML for documents.

[–] SomeRandomWords@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 1 year ago

Definitely agree with this one, though I will say you can replace one proprietary bit of software (Microsoft Office) with another (Google Drive/Docs) and get a large portion of the way in some industries. Really depends on what you need to do.

But alas, still no widely accepted FOSS alternatives.

[–] Zapp@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

Pro tip: If you draft documents in Markdown, lots of programs have a "preview" that renders perfect formatted text to paste into a Word document.

I find it saves me a ton of hassle to leave Word to the very last step, when .docx is required.

[–] SemioticStandard@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah I've been seeing this reasoning for many years now, but as someone who lives in Word and Excel for office work, it's actually been a really long time since I couldn't use Pages/Numbers/LibreOffice in place of Office just as effectively.